This went for Newgate as well. It was a pair of mighty fortress-turrets built on either side of a road that, as it wandered in from the countryside and crossed over Fleet Ditch, was named Holborn. But as it passed between those turrets, the high road was bottlenecked down to a vaulted passageway just wide enough for a four-horse team to squeeze through. Above, a castle-like building joined the turrets, and bridged the road. An iron portcullis made of bars as thick as Jack’s leg was suspended within that castle so that it could be dropped down to seal the vault, and bar the road. But it was all show. For thirty seconds of scampering along side streets and alleys would take Jack, or anyone else, to the other side. Newgate was not surrounded by walls or fortifications, but rather by buildings of the conventional sort, which was to say, the half-timbered two- and three-story dwellings that in England grew up as quick and as thick as mushrooms. This Gothick fortress of Newgate, planted in the midst of such a neighborhood, was like a pelvis in a breadbasket.
If you actually did come into the city along Holborn, then when you ducked beneath that portcullis and entered the vaulted passageway beneath Newgate you’d see to the right a door leading into a porter’s lodge, which was where new prisoners had their chains riveted on. A few yards farther along, you’d emerge from beneath the castle into the uncovered space of what was now called Newgate Street. To your right you would see a gloomy old building that rose to a height of three or four stories. It had only a few windows, and those were gridded over with bars. This was a separate piece of work from the turret-castle-vault building; rumor had it that it had once done service as an inn for travelers coming into the city along Holborn. But the prison had, in recent centuries, spread up Newgate Street like gangrene up a thigh, consuming several such houses. Most of the doorways that had once welcomed weary travelers were bricked up. Only one remained, at the seam between the castle and the adjoining inn-buildings. Going in there, a visitor could make a quick right turn into the Gigger, or, if he had a candle (for it grew dark immediately), he could risk a trip up or down a stairway into this or that ward, hold, or dungeon. It all depended on what sort of wretch he was coming to visit.
On Jack and Bob’s first visit they’d neglected to bring a light, or money with which to buy one, and had blundered down-stairs into a room with a stone floor that made crackling noises beneath their feet as they walked. It was impossible to breathe the air there, and so after a few moments of blind panic they had found their way out and fled back into Newgate Street. There, Jack had noticed that his feet were bloody, and supposed that he must have stepped on broken glass. Bob had the same affliction. But Bob, unlike Jack, was wearing shoes, and so the blood could not have come from him. On careful inspection of the soles of those shoes, the mystery was solved: the blood was not smeared about, but spotted his soles, an array of little bursts. At the center of each burst was a small fleshy gray tube: the vacant corpse of an engorged louse that Bob had stepped on. This accounted for the mysterious crackling noise that they had heard while walking around in that room. As they soon learned, it was called the Stone Hold, and was accounted one of the lowest and worst wards of the prison, occupied only by common felons-such as the late John Cole-who had absolutely no money. Jack and Bob never returned to it.
Over the course of several later sallies into the prison they learned its several other rooms: the fascinating Jack Ketch his Kitchen; the so-called Buggering Hold (which they avoided); the Chapel (likewise); the Press-Yard, where the richest prisoners sat drinking port and claret with their periwigged visitors; and the Black Dogge Tavern, where the cellarmen-elite prisoners who did a brisk trade in candles and liquor-showed a kind of hospitality to any prisoners who had a few coins in their pockets. This looked like any other public house in England save that everyone in the place was wearing chains.
There were, in other words, plenty of lovely things to discover at the time and to reminisce about later. But they were not making these arduous trips from the Isle of Dogs to Newgate simply for purposes of sightseeing. It was a business proposition. They were looking for their market. And eventually, they found it. For in the castle proper, on the north side of the street, in the basement of the turret, was a spacious dungeon that was called the Condemned Hold.
Here, timing was everything. Hangings occurred only eight times a year. Prisoners were sentenced to hang a week or two in advance. And so most of the time there were no condemned people at all in the Condemned Hold. Rather, it was used as a temporary holding cell for new prisoners of all stripes who had been frog-marched to the Porter’s Lodge across the street and traded the temporary ropes that bound their arms behind their backs, for iron fetters that they would wear until they were released. After being ironed (as this procedure was called) with so much metal that they could not even walk, they would be dragged across the vault and thrown into the Condemned Hold to lie in the dark for a few days or weeks. The purpose of this was to find out how much money they really had. If they had money, they’d soon offer it to the gaolers in exchange for lighter chains, or even a nice apartment in the Press-Yard. If they had none, they’d be taken to some place like the Stone Hold.
If one paid a visit to the Condemned Hold on a day chosen at random, it would likely be filled with heavily ironed newcomers. These were of no interest to Jack and Bob, at least not yet. Instead, the Shaftoe boys came to Newgate during the days immediately prior to Tyburn processions, when the Condemned Hold was full of men who actually had been condemned to hang. There they performed.
Around the time of their birth, the King had come back to England and allowed the theatres, which had been closed by Cromwell, to open again. The Shaftoe boys had been putting their climbing skills to good use sneaking into them, and had picked up an ear for the way actors talked, and an eye for the way they did things.
So their Newgate performances began with a little mum-show: Jack would try to pick Bob’s pocket. Bob would spin round and cuff him. Jack would stab him with a wooden poniard, and Bob would die. Then (Act II) Bob would jump up and ‘morphosize into the Long Arm of the Law, put Jack in a hammerlock, (Act III) don a wig (which they had stolen, at appalling risk, from a side-table in a brothel near the Temple), and sentence him to hang. Then (Act IV) Bob would exchange the white wig for a black hood and throw a noose round Jack’s neck and stand behind him while Jack would motion for silence (for by this point all of the Condemned Hold would be in a state of near-riot) and clap his hands together like an Irish child going to First Communion, and (Act V) utter the following soliloquy:
John Ketch’s rope doth decorate my neck.
Though rude, and cruel, this garland chafes me not.
For, like the Necklace of Harmonia,
It brings the one who wears it life eternal.
The hangman draweth nigh-he’ll turn me off
And separate my soul from weak’ning flesh.
And, as I’ve made my peace with God Almighty,
My spirit will ascend to Heaven’s Door,
Where, after brief interrogation, Christ will-
Bob steps forward and shoves Jack, then yanks the rope up above Jack’s head.
HAWKKH! God’s Wounds! The noose quite strangleth me!
What knave conceived this means of execution?
I should have bribed John Ketch to make it quick.
But, with so many lordly regicides
Who’ve lately come to Tyburn to be penalized,
The price of instant, painless death is quite
Inflated-far beyond the humble means
Of common condemnees, who hence must die
As painf’lly as they’ve lived. God damn it all!
And damn Jack Ketch; the late John Turner; and
The judges who hath sent so many rich men to